• Bahasa Indonesia
• Bahasa Melayu
• Bân-lâm-gí (Tâi-lô)
• Deutsch
• English
• Esperanto
• Ghanaian Pidgin
• Ikinyarwanda
• Nederlands
• Türkçe
• català
• español
• français
• hrvatski
• italiano
• norsk bokmål
• polski
• português
• português do Brasil
• slovenčina
• suomi
• svenska
• кыргызча
• македонски
• русский
• српски / srpski
• українська
• עברית
• العربية
• فارسی
• বাংলা
• ગુજરાતી
• 中文
• 日本語
• 한국어

• Overview
• How to make a wish
• Wishes
• Updates
• FAQ

Hi everyone – I’m Marshall Miller; I’m a senior director of product working with the teams that build the user-facing parts of the wiki software, which will be doing much of the work of accomplishing wishes going forward. As I posted on the talk page last week, Sonja Perry, MikeZ and I are on point for working with communities on how the wishlist program will operate in the future.

Over the past few weeks, over 100 volunteers have spoken up about what they need from the wishlist and how they think it should function, and we committed that we’ll work with volunteers over three months to clarify those plans. We’ve heard that the wishlist is a vital way that the needs of experienced editors get voiced. We’ve heard about the importance of the annual cadence of voting to draw volunteers’ attention to the wishlist and to create a moment when the community considers priorities together. We’ve heard that it’s important to ensure that sufficient WMF resources will be dedicated to accomplishing wishes. We’ve heard that volunteers need clear points of contact to whom they can ask questions and bring up problems around wishlist work.

Sonja, Mike, and I have been discussing with some users with extended rights (thank you!) to make some proposals about how the wishlist program can meet those needs. The proposals listed below are meant to cover some of the large aspects of the wishlist, but don’t cover all the many smaller details (we will get to those!). Please let us know on the talk page what you think of these. I also list some open questions we want to hear from communities on.

I want to note that while the below points are about how the wishlist program might run in the future, we also need to share with communities how we’ll accomplish wishes in the nearer term, over the coming months. We’ll get into those details in another update.

Proposals for the future

• We’ll return to a widely-advertised annual wishlist vote to identify the wishes that are the highest priority for the communities.
• To make the voting as useful as possible, a working group coordinated by the wishlist program manager will categorize and de-dupe wishes, and ask clarifying questions to the wishers.  The working group will have staff from the various WMF teams that will work on the wishes (e.g. someone from the Editing team, someone from the Moderator Tools team, etc.) We will also invite volunteers to join in this process to prepare for voting, and we want to figure out how that can work best.
• After wishes are voted on, WMF will take those vote counts and all the volunteer discussion into our annual planning process, so that we can prioritize them alongside the other non-wishlist work that we’re planning – making sure that highly-voted wishlist work gets resourced (and is not an afterthought). At that point, we’ll figure out which teams are well-positioned to work on which wishes, and build in time on team roadmaps to work on wishes. It’s important to note that, just as in the past, not all highly-voted wishes can be worked on – some wishes may be technically infeasible, or negatively affect certain users, or need to wait for the attention of a team that is focused on a different important priority.
• To make sure we’re dedicating sufficient resources toward wishes, we’ll look at past wishlist years and plan to accomplish similar amounts of wishlist work in upcoming years (with the knowledge that wishes vary in size).
• As part of sharing our annual plan with the communities in coming years, we’ll share which wishes will be worked on, by which teams, and roughly when in the year.
• We will make clear who the WMF contact points are for each wish that we’ll work on, so that volunteers can easily contact them with ideas and questions.

Open questions – we want to hear from you

• Sometimes there are multiple wishes that are related to each other, or especially large wishes. These might indicate some important area that requires major investment for editors. An example is the Page Curation and New Pages Feed improvements from the 2019 wishlist, which constituted substantial upgrades to that system. How might the wishlist help surface those major areas?
• In the past, the wishlist tried various approaches to make sure that wishes from sister projects and smaller languages were prioritized.  How might we make sure that smaller projects and languages get attention?
• Although it is crucial to have a period of high visibility for soliciting wishes and voting, would it be good to still allow submitting wishes year-round, so that when people have ideas/needs, they can submit them instead of needing to remember to do so months later?
• Past wishlist years have used various systems for determining exactly which highly-voted wishes are prioritized, and have taken into account aspects like the size of the wish and how to serve smaller projects and languages. We’re still thinking about what would work best going forward and want to hear your thoughts.

We hope to hear from you on the talk page, and we’ll continue to share updates.

Hi all, Suman again – Deputy Chief Product & Technology Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. I am writing to share a few more updates since last week.

• Ownership of Tools and Services: Many of you have asked about the ownership of the tools maintained by CommTech. We are aware of 27 tools and production services that were maintained by CommTech. This list was populated with the help of the former CommTech team members and aligns with what the community members have shared with us. We know code ownership continuity is important so that tools keep working. In April, we shared with the community how the Foundation will manage continuity of ownership for services in production – everything we run in production will have a team assigned to it. This is in progress now. We are putting the production services previously owned by CommTech through that process, which will mean we’ll assign new teams for their ongoing maintenance and support. When it comes to the tools owned by CommTech (different from the production services), we are working with the former CommTech engineers who have been placed in other P&T teams to establish what other teams will maintain and own those tools.
• Ownership of active CommTech Wishes: CommTech had been working on 9 wishes when the restructuring took place: Make the “Who Wrote That?” tool work in all languages; Add the “hide templates” option to What links here; Edit the introduction instead of the entire article; Make the Chart extension beginner-friendly; Support full color 3D models on Wikimedia projects; Allow sorting of discussions on talk pages; Special pages should have language links; Open the Wikimedia Commons file page directly, and the remaining Watchlist Labels work. Of those 9, two were close to completion and will stay with the former CommTech team members that were previously assigned to them, together with volunteer developers (“Who Wrote That?” And “Hide Templates”). The others have been divided and incorporated into existing roadmaps amongst the Editing and UX team, the Moderator Tools team and Wishlist Program Management, who will partner with volunteers where relevant on development work.
• Focus Areas: As Selena noted in her update, focus areas will no longer be applied as the majority of community feedback indicated that they made the process less clear. We will be updating our documentation to reflect the change in focus areas in the next week, and will continue to make updates based on what we hear from you in the coming weeks.
• Triaging and Tracking Incoming Wishes: This past week, the Foundation Product teams have continued to triage incoming wishes. Over the last few days, the PSI team prioritized sentiment analysis tools and^[1] the SRE team prioritized Enable Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) for Wikimedia sites. In terms of tracking, we’ve been in conversations with community members about better tracking progress on wishes through Phabricator and on-wiki monthly updates crediting volunteer developers, Foundation teams and anyone else helping to support this work. You can follow this triaging and tracking work, including individual wishes submitted, through our monthly updates and our statistics.
• Longer term: Though we’re talking about a few clear improvements to make to the wishlist going forward, there are many other ideas that volunteers have brought up and that we should consider together. Like Selena said in her previous update, that’s something we want to keep doing over the next three months, and we’ll figure out how to get more organized about it and synthesize all the ideas and proposals – so let’s please keep the conversations going.

Since the last update, one member of the CommTech team has joined the Mediawiki Engineering Team focusing on media infrastructure and two (one, two), the Moderator tools team. These existing teams are in a good position along with others to continue working with the community to tackle future wishes related to mediawiki engineering and moderator tools.

Hello all, I am Selena Deckelmann, CPTO of the Wikimedia Foundation. I have been engaged on the discussion page and continue to follow all conversations here and on en.wiki, as well as other forums, to ensure that I am hearing from as many people as I possibly can about the changes announced on May 20.

I wanted to thank everyone for the feedback and suggestions for improvements to the Wishlist going forward. In thinking about different aspects of the wishlist work, I have noticed a few recommendations we can already move forward with, and let’s keep the conversation going to better define how the wishlist can go well in the future.

• Focus areas: themed focus areas were added to the Community Wishlist around 2024 as they were a feature of the WMDE Wishlist that seemed to help that system work. It sounds like these made the process less clear as a whole. We can commit to removing these.
• Response time: Multiple editors have mentioned slow or no response to wishes and phabricator tickets. I am also interested in solving the phabricator backlog and responsiveness problems, but will focus on the Wishlist for the purpose of this conversation. We have committed to a 10 business day response time for submitted wishes. We will publish information about response time going forward, as we have been for the last two months in our Monthly Updates, so that community members can track how we perform.
• Annual cadence and voting on wishes: Last October, we added voting back. However, what many editors have noted is that we don’t run banners to invite people to participate, leading to only about 30% of the volume of unique participants. I understand that it’s important for the wishlist to have broad exposure, because it’s an accessible way for average editors to express their needs and ideas (whereas Phabricator or direct contact with WMF staff are higher barriers). We can commit to working with community members to invite participation. Suman has opened a thread about what annual participation might look like going forward. I welcome more conversation about how we can move forward with more voting and a better system.
• Hackathon wishes: This hasn’t come up, but over the last 2 years, we have introduced wishes to Wikimedia Hackathon. An example from this past hackathon, is that hacker Katie Filbert fulfilled a wish written by Nosferattus to add a date range filter for MediaSearch. We plan to continue making this an explicit part of Hackathon preparation.
• Fulfillment of wishes: I appreciate that Barkeep has posted an analysis of wishes, as well as Prototypeperspective ‘s analysis from a few months ago. Mike asked Barkeep to compare notes on his manual analysis of 46 wishes. I’m interested in ways of making this more accurate over time and proposed that we automatically create phabricator tickets for wishes that are adopted. I have a list of wishes that teams at the Foundation committed to as part of the FY26-27 annual plan in March 2026, and are planned to be implemented over the next 12 months or so. As new wishes we can commit to arise, I will add to this list.

Another issue raised by Rhododendrites is around how to engage with the right people at the right time. The Wishlist isn’t the only way that community input goes into WMF work – there’s Phabricator, Discord, discussions at events, talk pages for specific projects and teams, and regular meetings for users with extended rights. I would love proposals from you all on how to best make use of all these channels together, and for volunteers to be able to see the outputs that come from all these inputs.

Finally, an update on staffing. As my team has shared in our past posts, all six Community Tech team members are currently still working at the Foundation and are receiving expedited internal support to interview for open roles at the organization. We have concluded some of those hiring processes, and I’m pleased to share that three of the engineers have received offers for roles in other teams, two of which have been accepted already. They have been encouraged to update their team pages and other external pages as they feel comfortable. These changes will formally take effect next week.

Hello all, my name is Suman and I'm the Deputy Chief Product & Technology Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. I'm writing to share with all of you that we've decided to do some internal restructuring about how WMF responds to and supports wishes. After noticing that having a centralized team was leading to frequent bottlenecks and delays as CommTech staff coordinated with other teams, we've decided to shift Community Tech into a program that multiple teams are officially responsible for supporting. This is a model that has proven success already, but it will involve disbanding the Community Tech team and the roles of five engineers and one manager. We still have dedicated staff managing the wishlist intake and triage process and will continue the same financial support for this work, just under a different structure.

Moving forward, the wishlist will continue to work on wishes from across languages and wikis, and complements many of the other channels where we regularly hear ideas and feedback from volunteers (talk pages, Village Pumps, chat platforms, calls, conferences, etc.) Our latest community update offers a detailed update about our progress over the last month, including completing a wish for tagging and tracking which pages users need to edit and adding new languages to “Who Wrote That” and the P&E Dashboard. In the coming weeks and months, we hope you all will continue to see an uptick in the speed and number of wishes we are able to address over time via our monthly statistics.

Hello everyone! It’s time to share with you an update of the work we’ve done in the last month, and what lies ahead in terms of what we’re going to work on.

As part of the work on Watchlist labels, we closed another wish that was asking for tagging and tracking which pages users need to edit based on priority, interest levels, topics, and page improvement tasks. In addition, some of the required features of the wish were included in the newly deployed Personal Dashboard.

Also, we continued working on adding new languages to “Who Wrote That” and to the P&E Dashboard, with an additional 12 languages now available for those tools. There may be additional languages that will be available in the future.

Moreover, the Editing Team has been working on a wish related to a warning message when large amounts of content are being copy-pasted: a feature for this has now been deployed to all wikis and the team is currently asking for feedback about it.

Lastly, during the Wikimedia Hackathon in Milan, Katie Filbert worked on a patch to ensure to add a date range filter for MediaSearch. The patch is currently awaiting review.

This is what we are currently focusing on this month:

• Make the Chart extension beginner-friendly: we have finished some design mock-ups, which we have published on the new project page, and we started the technical implementation of the wish.
• Support full colour 3D models on Wikimedia projects: 3D rendering has now been improved (scene lighting and normalising model scale, see this example). In addition, we have been investigating GLB support for 3d2png, exploring a new potential solution to the problem, after we found the initial attempt to not work. You can track progress on Phabricator at phab:T424872.
• Add Wikipedia Mobile App’s Reading Lists to the Website: the feature has been deployed to all wikis on Beta only by the Reader team, which will be monitored to determine full production rollout.

Looking ahead, we already identified our priorities for the months to come:

• Add the "hide templates" option to What links here page, a wish that already made top 6 in the 2022 Community Wishlist survey and that has quite some support in its resolution by users now, that focuses on removing articles from “What links here” page if included in a template, rather than included directly in the text.
• Edit introduction instead of the entire article, a wish that asks for the possibility of editing only the incipit of an article, instead of opening the whole article in order to do it.
• A way to see why a file is somewhere underneath a specific category (tool to show cat-path), a wish that asks for a functionality that shows the categorization path of the file to the parent category, so that one can spot the faulty categorization and fix it.
• A proper audio player, a wish that calls for improving the current way for Wikimedia Commons to show and listen to audio files.
• Allow sorting of discussions on talk pages, a wish already proposed in 2023, to help projects and pages that have non-standard sorting of discussions. Instead of forcing all users into one sorting order,, we can allow individual users to sort discussions chronologically in their preferred order, or even by “last modified”.

Here is a snapshot showing the breakdown of wish status over the past month:

These numbers are regularly shifting due to new incoming wishes and more in depth review of wishes under review with stakeholders. The most notable shifts in numbers over the past month have been under review (down from 87 to 79), prioritised (up from 15 to 21) and long-term opportunity (up from 204 to 210).

Lastly, in April we reached a turnaround time of just under 3 business days for all new incoming wishes.

As always, there are topics and areas for which we are seeking your feedback. In particular:

• The Wikimedia Foundation’s 2026–2027 Annual Plan has been published, and six Key Results are relevant for recurring wishes. Join the talk page, which includes various prompts, authored collectively by the Product & Technology department.
  • For example, see the discussion on newcomers, which is relevant for the popular Highlight edit button wish.
• The draft we shared last month about how we triage and prioritise wishes to work on has now been published, and the page has been reorganised into sections due to the increased length.
• As we enter the new financial year in July, we have started to think about refreshing Focus Areas and have posted some initial thoughts where you can participate.

As always, if you have questions or feedback about it, please let us know in the Community Wishlist’s talk page. We are eager to hear from you!

_{Previous updates}

Recent wishes